In November 1975, the acclaimed Italian filmmaker Pasolini was murdered on a beach near Rimini under mysterious circumstances. Did the 17-year-old male prostitute, who confessed the murder, really kill the famous director or was somebody else to blame, maybe even the Italian government? Many conspiracy theories have been dealing with the question for more than forty years and the film by controversial Abel Ferrara is trying to answer it by recreating the last few days of the life of the untamed genius. A poet, writer, Marxist, journalist, director, film theoretician, homosexual, Catholic – the Italian filmmaker whose viewpoints and films constantly scandalized Italian public was all that. His last film – Salò Or 120 Days Of Sodom – is considered the most controversial film of all time because of explicit scenes of sex and violence in it.

Pier Paolo Pasolini is a figure Italians still struggle to come to terms with. Poet, novelist, agitator, journalist, filmmaker, playwright, actor, painter, philosopher, communist, Catholic, homosexual; these descriptors do not fully contain the depth and scope of the man’s restless genius. Described by many, including writers like Alberto Moravia, as the most important postwar poet in Italy, Pasolini devoted the second part of his career to the cinema and made some enduring masterpieces in the process. American director Abel Ferrara, another outlaw talent, has clearly found a soulmate in Pasolini. Starring Willem Dafoe, a dead ringer for Pasolini, Pasolini offers a kaleidoscopic view of the last day of the artist’s life, in 1975. Struggling with the censors as he is about to finish Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, pausing for an interview with a journalist that allows him to reflect on ideas of sex and politics, having lunch with his beloved mother with whom he shared a house, welcoming friends and former lovers – these are all moments that allow Ferrara to piece together the complex jigsaw puzzle that is Pasolini. And then, of course, there is his obsessive predilection for cruising the nocturnal streets of Rome in search of furtive sex.